In the 1940s, Vesta Stoudt, an employee at an ammunition packing plant in Illinois and a mother with two boys in the Navy, wrote a letter to president Franklin D. Roosevelt suggesting that ammunition cases be sealed with a “strong cloth tape.” The U.S. military then asked Johnson & Johnson to create a waterproof, cloth-based tape and “duck tape” was created. During the postwar building boom, “duck tape” became “duct tape,” when its chief use became taping heating ducts.